Society

The PSSN Program will offer annual seed/pilot grants to enable collaboration between Columbia and Barnard faculty in the humanities, arts, or social sciences, and faculty in the natural sciences whose primary focus is the empirical study of mind, brain, and behavior. This request for proposals is open to all full-time faculty at Columbia University and Barnard College that contribute to these interdisciplinary goals. Non-faculty applications may be reviewed on a case-by-case basis with at least one faculty member serving as co-investigator.

The Center for Science and Society at Columbia University invites proposals for innovative interdisciplinary projects involving the study of science in society that need modest amounts of seed money to initiate collaborative research and programming. All full-time faculty, students, and postdocs at Columbia University and Barnard College are eligible, and proposals are welcomed especially from undergraduate and graduate students. Projects might include small research projects, support for a reading group, inviting a speaker, or a contribution towards developing a conference.

The Science, Technology, and Society (STS) program supports research that uses historical, philosophical, and social scientific methods to investigate the intellectual, material, and social facets of the scientific, technological, engineering and mathematical (STEM) disciplines. It encompasses a broad spectrum of STS topics including interdisciplinary studies of ethics, equity, governance, and policy issues that are closely related to STEM disciplines, including medical science.

Each of the more than 800 fellows who have been in residence at the Radcliffe Institute has pursued an independent project, but the collaborative experience unites all of them. Scholars, scientists, and artists work on individual projects, or in clusters, to generate new research, publications, art, and more.

Network theory has provided novel concepts and analytical tools for understanding how actors can leverage privileged access to others' expertise to make sound decisions. But to date it has focused on the social ties that comprise social communities. By identifying communities through network patterns of attention, instead of through patterns of direct soical network linkages, this project will identify cognitive communities, thereby reorienting network analysis from its traditional focus on social ties.

Under the supervision of Prof. David Stark, Ph.D. student Joan H Robinson, will engage in archival research and interviews to investigate the regulatory framework for home diagnostics, looking in particular at how home diagnostics have contributed to the development of American legal frameworks of personal privacy and disclosure. Utilizing archival materials at the National Archives and those attained through the Freedom of Information Act, she will study the primary sources used by the Food and Drug Administration in their deliberation regarding the Medical Device Amendments of 1976.